Freya Tripp is a Tasmanian Born artist based in Northern NSW, holding a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours from Southern Cross University and a Master of Arts (Research) from Charles Darwin University.
“My practice has its beginnings in perspectives formed and shaped by personal experiences growing up in remote bushland in Northern Tasmania. My ‘home’ existed amid contrasts of wild bushland and cultivated gardens crafted by my mother. Her gardens are a vivid memory, comprising native and introduced species of plants and flowers and existing alongside what was a complex and troubled domestic experience. As an adult I have lived in Central Australia and spent time amid gardens cultivated by my father, set against the arid landscape and often ‘gothic’ backdrop of Alice Springs and the surrounding desert. Both of these environments have had a profound effect on me, and in turn on my practice as a painter.”
The artist carries with her many questions about home, belonging and identity, about the relationship the past and the present share in the making of memory and history, experience and encounter (individually and collectively) and the way in which this process becomes entangled. In attempting to capture these complexities / paradoxes she employs and manipulates strong traditions of still life, the decorative, botanical art, scale and motif, as well as scanography in the creation of large scale paintings. These visual references and processes are interwoven further with conceptual threads and aesthetic conventions including the Australian gothic, the concept of liminal space, the Freudian uncanny, the art/craft complex and the sublime.
“My intention is to create ‘transitory dwelling spaces’ that reflect the ambiguousness and disorientation of experience. They offer to encapsulate the fluctuating and overlapping spatial boundaries that lie between presence and absence, masculine and feminine, land and culture, self and other, ownership and belonging.” The works operate not as the focal point themselves, but as lenses to look ‘through’.
THE ARTIST HAS A GROWING BASE OF COLLECTORS ACROSS AUSTRALIA, THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITED KINGDOM AND HAS UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS AND RESIDENCES IN AUSTRALIA AND NORWAY IN 2021/22.