Antonia Aitken

Antonia Aitken, from Canberra, Australia, first came to WSW to teach elementary school students in the Hands-On-Art program. She also produced a series of large-scale woodcut prints,  drawing images in the landscape directly on plywood then returning to the studio and cutting the wood blocks in one sitting. In Antonia’s second residency, she taught Kingston High School students and produced the artist’s book, Drawing the Step.

With walking, drawing and printmaking at its core, Antonia’s multidisciplinary practice is a negotiation with the land that she walks. She uses the every day act and rhythm of walking as a tool for exploring the complex entanglement of body with place, investigating how these embodied states can invite more ethical and dialogical ways of interpreting places that bear witness to the complex and layered imprint of settler colonialism.

Community collaboration and teaching are integral to the artist’s practice. She has worked throughout Australia in various art education roles and with both indigenous and non-indigenous communities. These projects, with their focus on skill, knowledge and story exchange, have been fundamental to her development as an artist and her ongoing questioning of how to interpret her connection to place.

Antonia has exhibited her work and done residencies nationally and internationally. She is currently completing a Ph.D. at the Tasmanian College of the Arts in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Images (from left to right below):
Collecting Places 2; Drawing Breath; Entanglement 1; Untitled 2 – Peeling-hold fast.

 

Images

Artist's Book Collection

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