Here and Now: Gold Coast Triennial 2024 Digital Gallery
Alana Hampton
b.1959 Launceston TAS, lives Gold Coast QLD
Sensate Landscape: Portal , 2024
layers of photographs, drawings and ink painting; dye sublimation print on recycled fabric
Image courtesy of the artist
Artist Statement
My practice is a fusion of sensate experience, imaginings and documentation gleaned from the fringes between urbanity and the wild. I work in local precious habitats and places often seen as abject. Photographing by day and night, utilising underwater lights and cameras to gather often surreal and dreamlike impressions, my work is process-based, iterative and immersive. In the studio, I weave together physical and metaphysical traces from these gleanings using digital manipulations of my drawings, mark making, photography, and painting works.
Sensate Landscape: Portal comes from a much larger body of work I've called the Coombabah Wetlands Project, 2009 and ongoing.
"We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves" (Capra and Luisi 68-79). These patterns are made by my hand, feeling its place within place as it moves in the work and in the place.
Capra, Fritjof and Luisi, Pier Luigi, Systems View of Life, New York: Cambridge Press, 2014.
About the Artist
Alana Hampton graduated from the Tasmanian School of Art in 1981 with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art Education, majoring in Photography and Drawing. Since then, she has maintained a continuous art practice alongside a teaching career that spanned forty-four years.
Alana left a position as Head of Faculty at St Hilda's in 2023 to focus on her treasured Coombabah Wetlands Project, an expansive study begun in 2009, sitting between urbanity and the wild and undertaken by foot and kayak. The imagery takes in scruffy swamp land and underwater landscapes videoed in river estuaries and the Gold Coast Broadwater that feeds and drains the wetlands. Alana captures compelling sensate experiences of place in precious habitats and places of ever-changing beauty. Her recent work has been selected in several national exhibitions, and she is about to undertake a residency on King Island as a guest of the King Island Council.
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