Annabel Nowlan

The abstract mixed-media works of Annabel Nowlan are textured layers of paint and found objects, embodying a personal and lived experience of the Australian landscape. Raised on a farm in Bimbi, Wiradjuri country, South West NSW, Nowlan is acutely aware of the challenges of farm management, history of settlement, and occupation of Indigenous country. In this latest solo exhibition, she presents mixed media works not seen in Sydney before. She is working with the concept of ‘unfinished maps’ and the notion that connection with country and landscape is continually evolving. She is concerned with the impact of human intervention in the environment and the effect of corporate and automated farming on the land and livelihoods. Nowlan is a storyteller and each work is assembled with precise attention to embedding meaning in materials, objects and symbols. In Against the Odds she paints on hessian, with the raw texture of the material providing a harshness to a devastated landscape symbolised by white and the ongoing Indigenous connections represented in black. The Long Paddock is a colloquial term for droving, depicted as an aerial view it is an assemblage of old tarpaulins repaired and patched together, with a series of black marks evoking the movement of cattle across barren grazing land. These artworks connect us to post-war times and histories in rural Australia. Of the failed Soldier Settlement scheme and when swaggy symbols were chalked on fences with messages such as ‘religious talk = food’, ‘not safe’ and ‘alcohol in this town’. Nowlan brings these broad influences to her lived experiences of farming, marginalisation and our complex relationship with the land and culture. Her materiality is at times raw and sharp, like an old rusted tin or a barbed wire fence. Her palette is blacks, whites, greys and recurring shades of verdigris - the blue-green pigment or deposit that forms on copper, brass, or bronze. Nowlan is intimately connected to these materials, they are the metals, fabrics and utility of life on the land. Through her workings of surface, oils, texture and form Nowlan creates a unique vocabulary to talk of her experience, to celebrate her connection to this part of Australia and to also interrogate its future. Julianne Pierce