Site, surface

Opening Thursday 22 October 2009 @ 6pm. All welcome.
Exhibition continues until Saturday 7 November

Artist's talk: Saturday 24 October @ 10.30am. All welcome

Gallery hours Tuesday to Saturday 9.30am to 5.00pm

Jenny Peterson is a regional artist from Gippsland, Victoria and was the interstate recipient of printmaker-in-residence at Megalo in late 2008. Jenny has the unusual approach of collecting junk and scrap metal to create printed impressions. She uses found metal to shape and flatten, often with its own embossed texture, sometimes etched with her own marks then inked and printed the same way as an etching plate through the press.

Since her residency at Megalo last year her work was included in the exhibitions program of Impact 6 in Bristol, UK in September 2009. Impact is an international printmaking conference held every two years in a different country and comes to Monash University, Melbourne in 2011. The Bristol conference at University of the West of England attracted 350 delegates from 32 countries and showcased panel discussions, exhibitions, access studios and demonstrations over four days in venues across the city.

Recent works in Site, Surface respond to some of the localities around ACT. Using old maps from the collections of the National Library as digital components she layers these elements into the composition of the artwork when printing the surface of a road sign, such as On the Edge of Yarralumla. Her interest in museum studies provides an awareness of objects wherever she travels.

In 2006 she received Arts Victoria funding to develop new works using found metal, choosing the regions of Beechworth and Portland in Victoria as the research sites. Some of these works using local maps, cake tins and text will also be on show at Megalo as well as those that refer to Gippsland sites. Many of the works refer to environmental themes in some way and comment on the consumption of land. Personal stories are represented by the use of handwritten text from family and historical records.