Linda Joy &
Sonia Martignon
The Residency
27 May to 12 June
About Linda
Linda Joy is a practicing visual artist directly influenced by the unique life and culture of the Top End. Her work is predominately landscapes that hover between a traditional and modern representation, with a focus on the integrity and fragility of country.
Linda’s artistic journey is underpinned by regular bush trips and her visual journals where she documents observations, compositional field notes and studies. In the studio she works directly from these drawings and notes onto prepared linen or canvas with inks and washes. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and she has been the recipient of several art awards.
Currently Linda is participating in the ‘Artist in Residence’ program at Tactile Arts exploring and experimenting with printmaking. This work will feature in the upcoming exhibition ‘The Residency’ opening 27 May.
About Sonia
Sonia is an artist who is driven to record the beauty of our increasingly threatened natural environment. Armed with the belief that all living things are connected by the habitat they share, her work pays homage to these fertile landscapes. It reflects on humanity's sense of being ‘other’; of viewing ourselves as separate from the natural world, exploring the sensation of being an observer ‘looking in’ to a beautiful, foreign wilderness.
Sonia’s pieces are often created from hand cut plywood. The intricately cut edges of her work cast shadows, offering a portal into the landscape, to focus on a rapidly disappearing ecology. Her aesthetics are tethered to the deeply familiar verdant landscapes of the tropics. Sonia’s process includes documenting these places through a myriad of photographs and sketches which become the foundation of her work. Referencing these resources she decodes the landscape, counterbalancing the literal with the interpreted, allowing the creation of work that blurs boundaries between documentation and memory. Adhering to the words of Corot, recording the landscape is about finding moments of ‘truth bathed in an impression received from nature’.
Sonia has completed a Bachelor of Fine Art and is also a qualified teacher. Since beginning a fulltime art practice in 2019, Sonia has held solo exhibitions and participated in multiple curated group shows across Australia. Her work has been selected and exhibited in several respected national art prizes, receiving Highly Commended in the Korea-Australian Art Foundation Art Prize, Sydney (2021). In 2022 Sonia will complete a residency at Tactile Arts Studios in collaboration with Linda Joy. Having worked together on several projects, both are deeply inspired by nature and the natural processes that shape the landscape and will use the Tactile Arts Residency program to explore, experiment and expand their visual arts practice using non-toxic printmaking processes.
