FLEUR STEVENSON

ARTIST STATEMENT

The works explore memory, personal history and place. The sites of reference centre around the artist’s familial spaces in New Zealand including domestic dwellings, topography of townships and surrounding ecological landscapes. Childhood experiences are drawn out from memory and paired with spoken accounts from family members as well as observations of the visible terrain to evoke a relationship between memories of ‘then’ and reflections of ‘now.’

Each painting considers the physical environment and the associated ideas, feelings and emotions and the space the memories occupy on the surface, as an interior (self) and exterior (outside view of self).

I like to cut the canvas to size according to the location of each memory and take to work on at each site. Imprints and rubbings from the ground form the initial layers, establishing part of the painting’s history, where subsequent layers build my intuitive response to the site and reveal the memory as a character or landscape.

By revisiting each location and noting the observed view and emerging memory, Fleur synthesizes her interior thoughts with the exterior scape or place. This spatial relationship between interiority and exteriority is investigated through varying composition structures. In some instances, clearly visualised boundaries refer to this, and in others, spaces overlap and express their alternation through changing mark and colour.

ARTIST BIO

Born 1976 in New Zealand, Fleur lives and works on the land of the Gadigal and Wangal peoples of the Eora Nation in Sydney Australia. Fleur has recently held her first solo exhibition at Straitjacket in Newcastle in 2023 and exhibited in group shows in both Australia and New Zealand, since starting her career as an emerging artist in 2018.

Fleur’s work has been selected as a finalist in group exhibitions, including the Fishers Ghost Art Award (Contemporary) (2020, 2021 + 2022), Milburn Art Prize (2021), Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize (2021) and the Parkin Drawing Prize NZ (2021). Awards she has received include the Merit Award for her work “A Journey’s Drawing” in the Parkin Drawing Award, New Zealand (2021), the Work of Excellence Prize, Glebe Art Show (2022) and Second (Contemporary) Shoalhaven Art Society 54th Open Art Prize, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra NSW.

Fleur has completed residencies including the Cloudbough Art Residency, Kandos NSW (2022) and more recently is part of the Community MFA Salon Series with Amber Boardman + Lisa Wolfe, Bushwick Studios, Brookvale NSW (2023).
Her work is held in various private collections in Australia and internationally.