Paula Payne

BIO

Paula Payne Bio
Through painted landscapes I respond to scientific research about the Anthropocene including climate change and geological epochs, and geographical sites of environmental changes. I am not a scientist and as an artist I engage the problem on a level of intellectual and sensory responses to information that include engaging metaphor to imply the presence of the Anthropocene, and the metaphysics of space envisioned as semi abstract, abstract and sublime form. I view landscape and the environment as the spaces and systems that human lives depend upon.

Throughout my life, I have been influenced by my father’s engineering work and workshop inventions. Part of this included my constant exposure to technical drawings rendered by hand. I studied technical drawing with my father’s help as well as at school, and these elements of fine line graphic renderings are integrated into many of my landscape works, identifiable as a personal style. I feel that this linear component of the work is a reflection on both historical ways of capturing the landscape and a form of contemporary mapping that reflects the anxious world humans now inhabit. The line renderings extend to cartography, including lines of latitude and longitude, and refer to ways that humans have named and claimed the globe through physical explorations and world travel. My own personal interest in mapping emerged in my youth during two trips by sea to and from England with my mother in my childhood and teenage years. I realise that from these experiences I learnt about mappings of lines of latitude and longitude, the equator, Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, and expansive ways of viewing the world by defining the land, sea, and sky.

My particular interest in visions informed by large spaces suggesting the infinity of the night sky, are of particular interest and were formed during this time.