January Featured Artist: Andrea Przygonski

Every month NAVA selects an artist from our Gallery to feature on the homepage. For January NAVA's featured artist will be Andrea Przygonski. Andrea Przygonski is an early career Visual Artist currently living and working in Adelaide. While she primarily focuses on print media and installation, her practice also includes artist books, mixed media, sculpture and new media. Below Andrea speaks to NAVA about her work, the best bits of 2011 and what she has planned for the year ahead.

NAVA: Could you tell us about your practice?
Andrea Przygonski: My practice mainly centres on printmaking and installation work and I tend to inhabit the microcosm. I’m interested in unseen, unspoken and hidden things. There’s a real mystery about the micro sphere that intrigues me – the forms, colours, sounds, moods and machinations. It’s a fairly fertile place to play.
 
NAVA: Your practice is quite varied. What do you enjoy about the various mediums you choose to do your work in?  
AP: Working with varying mediums is always stimulating, sometimes perplexing and constantly challenging. Sometimes an idea will drive the medium used, or I’ll discover a material that is really interesting and that is what dictates the work.  

I’m very attracted to process and the language of materials.  I’ve always taken things apart to find out how they work and when I find an interesting or unusual material or process I become absorbed in searching for an understanding of how it functions.

One of my favourite materials is lycra. I have a very large collection of stockings and incorporate these into my work where it suits. Their tensile strength and malleability is wonderful and they come in all shades and shapes and are a great carrier for printed imagery.

I also have an interest in using technology and this led me to create my first web-based work to commemorate the 50th anniversary of my sister’s passing.

NAVA: What have your 2011 highlights been?
AP: There were many highlights!  Here are a few of the more unexpected highlights:

• Picking up the crochet needle again after 35 years to help build the Adelaide Crochet Reef – a part of the worldwide hyperbolic crochet reef project.
• Sitting on the Peer Review Assessment Panel for the latest round of Arts SA visual arts grants.
• Being accepted to do a Master of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco AND being awarded a Printmaking Teaching Assistantship there through the Hamaguchi Bequest.  

NAVA: What’s coming up next for you?

AP: I’m involved in an international print folio exchange with Monterey Peninsula College Print Club in California and am developing some work for that right now.

The whole folio will also be shown in Adelaide during SALA Festival 2012 and in California at a later date.

I’m hoping to take up the offer to study at CCA starting in September 2012. Whilst this is a fantastic once in a lifetime opportunity it is costly and I need support from all quarters to raise extra money to get there! My Teaching Assistantship will go some way to helping with costs and I have been accepted onto AbaF’s Australia Cultural Fund to receive donations.

(Did I mention I am raising funds to support my studies? Tax deductible donations can be made online through AbaF’s Australia Cultural Fund: www.abaf.org.au/donors/artist-projects/andrea-przygonski.html

Links

www.andreaprzygonski.com.au

www.visualarts.net.au/gallery/andreaprzygonski