CONTACT domenica_h@hotmail.com
I am a Brisbane-based visual artist. My practice is in portraiture, drawing, watercolour, and printmaking (lithography, intaglio).
In 2015, I graduated from Queensland College of Art (QCA) at Griffith University with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Class I Honours) degree. In 2020, I completed a Master of Visual Art program at QCA.
Over the past two decades, the sense of why I create art has developed from an innate need to a dawning realisation, over the past few years, that my making art is about deep ideas, feelings, and concerns that have sometimes eluded verbal expression, or even acknowledgement, by me, yet force their way through my work, nonetheless. The images I create are of the familiar, be that a human figure familiar to me and recognisable to others in ways; or domestic interiors; or garden settings; or landscapes of beach scenes, or country houses, or streetscapes, or city views; or built structures such as interesting houses, bridges, or public buildings that speak a quiet language of their own. Reflecting on this output has been both revelatory and empowering as I have gained the realisation that themes in my work go to the complexities of living, and to the entwinements of humans and nature coexisting in one place. These are huge, profound matters, and I am conscious now of my smallness, yet also of my voice, through art, to speak of these things. It is on the mundane, daily stages of our lives that they are mostly lived, and I see that I am addressing the profound through the undervalued, unexamined plain.
In my work, I grapple with what human nature is; with Nature trying to exist under the human-made infrastructure that is superimposed over it; with what human and nature futures will be like under human-made storm and clouds. I have always felt an unsettling doubt about who I am; what I am doing, should be doing; about what will happen. This is reflected in a sense of unease in my work that is destabilising for the viewer. Often my works are quiet, but I hope to hang a question or more in the loaded atmosphere of each image. There is now this self-realised turn in my work as it opens to the possibility of connection with the viewer about all kinds of questions.
I remain influenced by a couple of serendipitous finds during my undergrad years. One is the poem, “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow” by Les Murray, and the other a painting, “Collins Street, 5 p.m.” by John Brack that demonstrates the non-understanding, the not-seeing of some of Murray’s onlookers. I admire and appreciate the work of many artists and illustrators, but particularly Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, Jörg Schmeisser, Shaun Tan, and Lisbeth Zwerger. Their ideas, subjects, styles, stories, use of colour, and imagination are teaching and learning tools for me.
Despite nagging anxiety and worry, I do look to the present and the future with (guarded) hope and optimism. Forming tight bonds with others, and forging ties with nature wherever I am, lead me to find joyfulness and truth. While my artwork stems from the personal, it has universal themes. Preoccupations in my work are to examine fault lines in human relationships and to expose tensions in human-nature relationships. I look forward to a time when human relationships, and human-nature relationships, are transformed. Even though I become disheartened by how one person or group can treat another, or I become distressed by yet another tree being felled in my old, inner-city suburb to make way for a three-storey house to be built or a pool to be installed, Wordsworth’s lines, “Come forth into the light of things; Let Nature be your Teacher,” remain as inspiration and hope.
