Kat RAE – Victoria

Australian Army (2000 – present)

Visual Arts ~ Program 19.1

Artist’s Context – Gelli Mono Mash-up Collage: For ANZAC Day (2020)
Last week, just before I packed up the studio I’d made at the family farm so I could move it back to the city, I made a mash up.
I used the ghosted mountain and war memorial images from my mono print backing sheet and layered my torn gelli print experiments. I added frottage using the military symbology stencils. I found the thinnest stencils worked best over the Japanese paper with my graphite block.

I have enjoyed looking at Katrin von Maltzahn’s work for inspiration. Her ‘model drawings’ gave me the idea of adding a more technical aspect to the natural look of the mountains through the stencilling. The darkness she creates in her frottages was also something I wanted to replicate in the foreground of my piece as I tried to add depth.

Loosely based on Afghan mountains, this piece talks to the layering of meanings and memory a landscape can have.
Military symbology stencils are used to mark a map to plan an operation. The shapes and colours represent capability, location and intended actions. It is a specific way to look at an environment, which overlooks the ancient beauty of landscape,
and what it means as a place. The faint abstract Australian War Memorial in the left foreground
is a nod to the resting place of many in this war.