June Friends Night: Artist talk with Annika Romeyn

Drill Hall Friends are invited to join artist Annika Romeyn as she speaks about her practice and her work in the Drill Hall Gallery exhibition Material Nature (June 20-August 10).

Romeyn lives and works on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country in Kamberri/Canberra. She combines drawing, printmaking and painting to create intricate and immersive works on paper. Romeyn’s embodied experiences of nature extend to her making processes. She often scales her work in relation to her outstretched body and uses her fingertip as a mark-making tool, embedding a sense of care and value in the environments she depicts.

Romeyn graduated from the ANU School of Art and Design (Printmedia and Drawing) in 2010 after undertaking a liberal arts education on scholarship at Morgan State University, Baltimore, USA (2005 – 2009). Field-based residencies and cultural exchanges have been significant to Romeyn’s practice – these include the Embassy of Spain’s Torres Travelling Scholarship (2011); Bathurst Regional Gallery’s Hill End Residency (2015); Bundian Way Arts Exchange on Yuin Country (2019); and Broken Hill City Art Gallery’s Open Cut Commission (2022). She has been awarded the River of Art Prize (2024); the Canberra Arts Patrons Organisation’s Mandy Martin Art and Environment Award (2023); the Burnie Print Prize (2021); the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2020); and the National Works on Paper prize (2020). Annika Romeyn is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne. http://www.annika-romeyn.com

Material Nature looks to the power of materials to engage our multi-sensory experience of the natural world. With a focus on embodied awareness, the conventional idiom of landscape painting is collapsed, the viewer is no longer positioned outside nature, but within. Works by artists Ros Auld, Manini Gumana, Jahnne Pasco-White, John Peart, Ana Pollak, Annika Romeyn, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and Garawan Wanambi invite contemplation of our inter-relations with ecologies.

If not already a member you can join the Friends online, in the Gallery or over the phone. 

Image: Annika Romeyn with her work Old Mutawintji Gorge 1, 2023, watercolour monotype on paper, 168cm x 228cm. Photo: Sammy Hawker.