Zella Casey Brown - Gone Again, 2023 - Monotype on cotton rag - 71x53cm framed

Zella Casey Brown is a multidisciplinary artist who works across the fields of print, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In 2023 she completed her Masters of Fine Arts at the National Art School, developing a performative monotype printing method which reflects the paramount connections between body, mind and material. Through her experimental and research-based practice, she explores the cyclical dialogue between muscle memory and imagination to reveal traces of self in her work, what she describes as “abstract disclosures of sensory experience”.

Zella begins by spreading ink across a perspex plate. Damp paper is carefully placed on top and then rolled through a printing press. The paper absorbs the ink, capturing Zella’s painterly gestures as well as the imperfections of the perspex surface. This affords the work a sense of depth, despite being created with a single layer of pigment. Each artwork is one-of-a-kind, representing a singular moment of creative expression.

Central to Zella’s work is the shoshin approach, the Zen Buddhist philosophy of the “beginner’s mind”. As opposed to the pursuit of mastery, shoshin encourages an attitude of creative openness and a willingness to learn, in order to inspire ongoing innovation and the genuine expression of self. Zella shares that, “as a way of being, shoshin creates a discourse of forgetting and remembering, between tacit knowledge of the body and explicit knowledge of the mind”. These beliefs are expressed so poignantly in her body of work Ever and Ever. The title alludes to the perpetual nature of Zella’s physical movements when creating, interfaced with her ongoing investigation into the connections between mind, body and material.

Artwork location: Sydney

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