CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Terri Brooks

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Terri Brooks in conversation with WideWalls Magazine

Exploring the physicality of paint and surface textures, Dr Terri Brooks formally investigates natural mark making. With a leanness of technique and an innate feeling for surface textures, Brooks utilises her materials to produce rich and complex works that speak of creating art out of something humble and ordinary. Brooks states of her practice ‘My current challenge as an artist is to make paintings via the simplest means possible. Over time the content of my works has reduced so they are now mostly constructed with fundamental elements - black, white, dot and line, horizontals and verticals.’

Her paintings arise from an intuitive, repetitive process of mark making and layering informed by observations of natural environmental processes, including weathering, ageing, and renewal, coupled with an inner quest to find new solutions and visual expressions. Architectural elements observed during her regular inner-city walks also inform the work as does a love of patterns and the Australian tradition of ‘making do’, which has fascinated her since childhood.

Brooks studied at RMIT and in 2010 graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Ballarat. In 2014 Brooks exhibited in Direction Now, a major group exhibition staged at Port Macquarie’s Glasshouse Regional Gallery, responding to the Direction 1 exhibition of 1956, the first exhibition in Australia to legitimise abstraction. In 2006 she participated in a government funded artist workshop in North East Germany and in 2009 was invited to exhibit at the State Gallery of Neubrandenburg, Berlin, officially opened by the Australian Embassy.

Brooks has held over twenty solo exhibitions and has participated in shows in the US, UK, Germany, Hong Kong and New Zealand. She has been selected several times as a finalist for the Fleurieu Art Prize and the Tattersall’s Landscape Art Prize, and finalist in the Kedumba Drawing Award and Alice Prize. She was awarded a BP Acquisitive Award in 1992 and an Australia Council Grant in 1991. Her work is held in the collections of the Neubrandenburg Museum Germany, Macquarie Group Collection, Westpac Bank, Albert Tucker Collection, BHP Ltd and many other corporate collections, as well as numerous private collections in Australia, the United States, England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. For over ten years her works have been sought by leading interior designers and architects to enhance exclusive and award winning interiors.

'When I refer to ‘pure’ abstraction, I am thinking more about, say, the visual difference between Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. One is full of spiky elongated, exaggerated reality coupled with recognisable human expression, anxiety being predominant. The other is not illustrational; instead, it is marked by mood, observation, energy and the actually visible involvement of the painterly mark.'
Andrew Gaynor, excerpt from the opening speech, Direction Now, October 2014