‘Markers’ explores my ancestral connections to ideologies surrounding family, freemasonry, navigation, grief and the afterlife. These sculptures directly reference sandstones shards that transport me to a time when I was a child and my father worked in a sandstone quarry north of Sydney.

Finalist, HIDDEN Rookwood Sculptures, 2023.

‍After hiatus from making, these new works from the artist are the accumulation of thoughts and experiences from over the last 10 years. Responding to notions of isolation, discomfort, and attachment Raffan often utilises up-cycled and found materials whilst also working in specific locales.

‍It starts with a mark, a line drawn on a scrap of paper, or an object picked up during a walk. A fragment of text dotted down on an old receipt, or a memory suddenly recalled on a warm afternoon. The incidental acts that could be the beginning of an artwork. The small thoughts that have the potential to grow into bigger ideas. How often do we dismiss humble gestures due to a lack of time or space? What if we gave them the encouragement and space to develop into something more?

But with spring comes the longed for release from the darkness, and as winter slowly dissolves, the mood lifts and all the senses are filled with the prospect of endless summer days. The Swedish writer August Strindberg once declared that summer is the season when ‘in all the countries in the North, the earth is a bridge and the ground is full of gladness’. This light-dark dichotomy, with all its atmospheric conditions generates an environment that provokes us to ask: how do you feel the weather, the landscape or a place?

Propelled by a searching spirit this project revolved around an enquiry into binaries of substance, space and time. It is a philosophical and physical excavation into internal and external landscapes, and an encounter with the darkness and light that permeate these spaces.

Both artists explore their ongoing interest discussing methods of art making and philosophies connected to place, structural and physical awareness.

In association with Sunsiz Media Residency, Yuwaalayaay (Lightning Ridge), NSW, Australia.

Living room landscapes, 2014-2015, (29 pieces), plaster, clay, wool and cotton, assemblage/dimensions variable.

Series of screenprints developed during an artist in residency program with WASPS, The Steeple, Fife, Scotland. In conjunction with a Kickstarter campaign, grant and associated support from Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Finalist Freemantle Arts Centre Print Award, 2015.

Performance and social practice developed during an artist in residency program with WASPS, The Steeple, Fife, Scotland. In conjunction with a Kickstarter campaign, grant and associated support from performanceNOW, Generator Projects and Verdant Works, Dundee, Scotland, UK.

Artists Michelle Heldon and Taryn Raffan work together creating intuitively inspired performances and social practices developing creative ways of communicating animate and abstract ideas.

Raffan’s works show a deep interest in the relationship between body and nature. Where the modern domestic marks human in and nature out, Raffan seeks to create a new synthesis and more sustainable relationship with our external world – formulating new possibilities for comfort outside of consumer habits and identities.

… process is paramount.

Taryn Raffan is an artist of diverse talent and quirky vision. Her solo exhibition ‘Bundles’ at Podspace is intriguingly wry, and I wonder if it is by accident or design both possibilities are inherent in the work which combines the sculptural and metaphorical potential of brown paper with the ubiquitous imagery of interior advertising.

As she stands and wraps her own body in swathes of material, the hypnotic baseline serves as an anchor amid the unusual process, a living mummification, a preservation process of sorts. Swaddling herself in colour and line, she wonders what it is exactly that is being preserved? Tradition? Culture? A system of belief? Simply a moment in time and space?

Series of plaster moulds, resin, PVA glue, copper wire, shellac and found objects, approximately 35cm x 45cm each.

Wall installation of 200 artist proofs: lithographs, solar and zinc plate etchings, van dyke prints and pigment ink on Hahnemühle paper.